By Len Wallick
This coming Wednesday, the Moon will pass completely in front of Mars, blocking it from view. That is called an occultation. It would also be appropriate, if not precisely accurate, to call the event a special-case conjunction or an eclipse. Sound familiar? It should.
Something very similar happened near the end of June, when Luna crossed paths with Venus in exactly the the same spot in late Gemini. We are therefore getting an opportunity to participate in a grand and potentially enlightening experiment that will tell us all something about ourselves individually and collectively. A good experiment maximizes the constants and minimizes the variables. That way, it is possible to isolate the variables and learn something about them.
The successive lunar occultations of Venus and Mars in the same degree of the same sign, 28 days apart, along with a remarkable number of events to follow, are clearly related. Those are the constants. The most substantial variables are the archetypes represented by Venus and Mars themselves. The object of our experiment, then, is to distinguish our relationship to those archetypes and figure out how they are expressed in our lives.
The 26th degree of Gemini has an auspicious Sabian symbol that includes the image of trees, frost and winter skies. The visionary astrologer Dane Rudyar interprets that tableau to represent the “revelation of archetypal form” as all the extraneous umbrage is stripped away leaving only the barest expression of reality and an “essential rhythm of existence.” In this case our attention is clearly being directed away from the constants distinguished by repetition and toward the starkly contrasting variables that remain: Venus and Mars.
The eminent astrologer Robert Hand refers to Venus as “a Yin planet” that “rules the spontaneous power of attraction.” Mars, on Robert’s other hand, is described as the Yang counterpart representing “the drive of an entity to be itself.” Together they form a set of polarities with a continuous and dynamic balance that is “rather delicate and easily upset.” If the course of public events in July is any indicator, the lunar occultation of Venus seems to have coincided with a tipping in favor of the Martian archetype.